Optimising Outcomes

A patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a measurement based on a report that comes from the patient (ie, study subject) about the status of their health condition without amendment or interpretation of the report by a clinician or anyone else. A PRO can be measured by self-report or interview, provided that the interviewer records only the patient’s response. Symptoms or other unobservable concepts known only to the patient (eg, pain severity or nausea) can only be measured by PRO measures. PROs can also assess the patient perspective on functioning or activities that may also be observable by others, such as quality of life, time to pain progression, and time to deterioration of physical symptoms.

In 2016, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) reported the FDA indicated that benefits in PROs can be the basis for full drug approval (1). While this is true and PROs are clearly the best way to collect patient data in clinical trials, the American Medical Association points out that other challenges exist that many oncology studies struggle to overcome: small patient numbers, very sick or terminally ill patients, high failure rates, and single-arm studies unique to the development of new therapies in oncology (2). For this reason, careful thought must go into designing and implementing PRO measures in the oncology clinical trial setting (3).

Katie Garner is Therapeutic Areas Advisor at CRF Health. She is responsible for providing specific therapeutic advice and supporting the therapeutic, sales, marketing and product development teams. Previously, Katie worked as a Project Manager for a Health Outcomes Consultancy and at the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agencies Centre for evidence-based purchasing. She also worked for the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency as a Senior Medical Device Specialist where she was responsible for the safety and regulation of in vitro diagnostic and contraceptive medical devices.

Reading Scientific Services Ltd (RSSL), a leading provider of scientific
and technical solutions to the global biopharmaceutical,
pharmaceutical, and biopharmaceutical sectors, has introduced the United
Kingdom’s first same-day mycoplasma testing service for manufacturers
of biologic medicines.
More info >>

The complexities surrounding product serialization for pharmaceutical and medical device companies are immense. While current serialization requirements are limited to marking the unit of sale with a unique data carrier, by 2023 the process will require a product to be traceable through the entirety of its journey - from the individual package through the carton/pallet to its final point of distribution. In the United States, the Healthcare Distribution Management Association (HDMA) is suggesting that pharmaceutical companies begin to support this level of serialization, called aggregation, now. Around the world – in Europe and Asia in particular – disparate track and trace practices are incrementally moving toward a global standard that will, undoubtedly, be more stringent than today’s differing benchmarks. How can companies manage this transformation with the greatest degree of success while also minimizing business disruption? The key to creating an optimal implementation strategy is to select a serialization solution that has strong capabilities at all levels of technology. It’s also important to choose a solution that enables multi-phase implementationMore info >>